According to a new study, even people who eventually land at the top of the socioeconomic ladder may not reap the same health benefits as those who were born there.
Traditionally, researchers studying this phenomenon have looked at data at one point in time, but they have not tracked how health is impacted over a person's lifetime. A research group led by Gregory Miller, a psychology professor at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research, wanted to know what happens to the health of those whose socioeconomic status changes over time, known as"socioeconomic mobility.
They found that when a person transitions out of poverty they tend to experience less stress and depression. However, some illnesses traditionally correlated with poverty remained -- despite their high socioeconomic status. People who climbed the economic ladder still experienced higher rates of metabolic syndrome, a group of conditions that lead to a higher risk of heart disease including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and excess fat around the waist.In this undated file photo, a patient gets their blood pressure taken.Miller’s research group first noted these findings in a small group of African American youth in rural Georgia with low socioeconomic status.
"We started to ask why,'' Miller said."And we started to try to see if this was also true outside of the context of small, rural towns in Georgia in studies of African American working poor families ... [we wanted to] use more representative samples that are more economically, racially and ethnically diverse, and ask the same kind of general question about what does mobility look like for health.
The resultant prospective study, which looked at 9,419 people from two nationally representative data sets, answered Miller's question. Even in a diverse sample of study participants that included men and women of all races, the higher risk of metabolic disorders and related heart conditions lingered in people who were upwardly mobile. Those who held high socioeconomic status throughout their life did not see these negative health effects.
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